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Authors: P. E. Ryan

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BOOK: Saints of Augustine
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This time, his mom didn't stay away. She didn't even knock. The door flew open and she closed it behind her and stepped toward his desk, where he'd sunk down into the chair in front of his darkened computer screen.

“I have
had
it with your attitude, young man,” she said firmly, folding her arms.

“Too bad.” This was harsh—more harsh than he'd meant it to sound. She stepped toward him, then turned away, then turned around again and practically stabbed her body down onto the end of his bed, her arms still folded over her chest. Her lips were clenched and her jaw was sliding from side to side. She was waiting for him to speak again.

He said, “So I guess you're sleeping with him.”

“Sam!” His mom released her arms, and her hands seemed to move around without knowing what to do. Then they settled into her lap. She didn't look angry; she looked almost sad at that moment, and it diffused him a little. “Yes. Teddy and I slept in the same bed last night. I'm not going to lie to you about that.”

“Dad's bed.”

“It's no longer your father's bed, and you know it.”

“Where's his car?” Sam heard himself ask. It was a crazy question: Who cared about the big oaf's car?

“Teddy was going to come over last night, but he had a flat tire. So I drove over to his house and
brought him back here. He stayed the night.”

“And you slept together.”

“Yes.”

“But you're not married, right? I mean, you didn't elope without telling anyone, did you?” He felt his eyes welling up.

“No. Teddy and I aren't married. We're dating.”

“Well, if you aren't married, you shouldn't be sleeping together.” Another crazy remark. Sam didn't care if people had sex when they weren't married. He just didn't want his mom and Teddy in the same bed—especially not the bed she used to share with his dad.

She reset her jaw. She studied him. “Listen, Sam. You need to understand how the world works. You need to understand that your father and I aren't together any longer.”

“I understand that.”

“We're separated.”

“But you're not divorced.”

“No. We're not divorced. But you need to understand—”

“I understand!” Sam snapped. “And I understand why! Dad's gay!”

She shushed him fiercely.

Sam lowered his voice. “He's with David now, I know that! Okay?”

The look of anger that formed on her face was so pronounced that he wondered if he'd gotten it all wrong.

“What makes you say that?” she hissed in a loud whisper. “Has your father said anything to you?”

“No! I wish he would, but he hasn't. He's too busy moving to London.”

“He's not moving there. He's visiting. But what makes you say that he's—like that?”

“Because I know about it, okay? I just know. And I
really
know, so don't try to tell me it's not true.”

“Have you talked to Hannah about this?”

He shook his head. “I'm not stupid. It would totally blow her mind. But, Mom, why are you
doing
this?”

The anger returned to her face. “Why am I doing what? Dating someone?”

He'd painted himself into a corner. His dad was dating David. His dad was
living
with David. Why couldn't his mom date someone? The logic of it only
made him more frustrated, and he blurted out, “I mean, why Teddy? I
hate
Teddy.”

She breathed through her nose. She brushed her blond hair out of her face. “Why?”

“Because he's—”
A jerk. A loudmouth. No, just say what you really want to say.
“Because he's a homophobe.”

That would really get her, he thought. There was no arguing with it, given the remarks Teddy had been making lately, and what had happened in their family. But she completely surprised him by narrowing her eyes for what felt like an eternity, and then leaning forward and asking, with a sad look on her face, “Tell me something, Sam. Are you going through some phase where you think
you
might be gay?”

No one had ever asked him that point-blank—not Melissa, not even Justin during last night's online conversation. Never in a million years would he have thought that the first person to ask him this question would be his mom. Suddenly, it all felt so much more complicated. If he said “maybe”—and he wanted to say “maybe” to
somebody
at this point—his whole gripe against Teddy would seem encapsulated
in maybe-gay Sam's getting his feelings hurt when Teddy made his homophobic remarks.

His mom was waiting for an answer.

Options raced through his mind.

I don't know yet.

So what if I am?

Yes! Okay? Yes!!

“No,”
he said firmly. She still had that sad expression, so he added, “I'm
not
. I just don't like it when he says that stuff, because it's like he's insulting Dad, that's all.”

The look of relief that spread over her face made him feel sick to his stomach.

“So this isn't because you think you might be—”

“No!”
he said again.

“All right.” She smoothed her hands over her knees. “Okay. I'll talk to Teddy. I'll ask him not to say things like that. But you really need to work on this, Sam. Teddy's going to be around. And you need to be able to get along with him.
You
have to do some work here, too. Okay?”

This was awful. Beyond awful. He hadn't accomplished anything other than having a fight with his
mom and patching things up by lying to her. He might as well have been one of those passengers on the
Poseidon
who had no idea that
up
was the right direction to go and just kept on telling people to move
down
, toward doom. “I'll try,” he said, staring at the floor in front of her feet.

9.
(You're like money waiting to happen.)

The thumb started bleeding
again. Charlie was sitting next to his father, watching a tennis match on TV, when the dark spot on the bandage caught his eye. “Your hand, Dad.”

His father glanced at him. “Huh? Oh.” He looked down. “This is one stubborn thumb. Can you get me the first-aid kit?”

“Yeah.” Charlie walked into the kitchen, a faint sensation of panic creeping into his chest. He brought the kit back to his father and knelt down in front of him to help.

They'd gone through four bandages of folded gauze and surgical tape in the past two days. When his father cut away the old gauze, the wound—surrounded now by pale, wrinkled flesh—began to seep bright red. “We should have gone to the emergency room,” Charlie told him.

“I don't think they would have stitched it; it's a puncture. Cut me some tape?”

“Maybe you should get a tetanus shot.”

“That's for rusty metal. This was just a piece of glass.”

“Well, why won't it stop bleeding?” Charlie dangled the strips of tape from the ends of his fingers. The feeling of panic was clutching the inside of his chest. He and his father hadn't talked about what had really happened that night. They'd talked about how the glass had exploded like a grenade. They'd talked about how his father had gone to bed early and slept for ten hours, and how he hadn't been able to eat for most of the next day, but it was if they were discussing someone who had the flu and was just fighting normal symptoms. Neither one of them had mentioned the drinking.

Charlie was still angry at his father for throwing a wrench into his evening with Kate. He was mad at himself, too, for getting high (though who wouldn't want to get a little high after watching your drunk father practically bleed to death at dinner?) and for taking that stupid nap in the middle of getting ready to go. The whole evening was like one bad joke. Here it was, two days later, and Kate still wouldn't take his phone calls (and boy, was he sick of hearing Mrs. Bryant say, “I'm sorry, Charlie, but Kate doesn't wish to…”).

More than anything, he was worried about his father. Watching the thumb get rebandaged, he fought his sense of panic, and yet couldn't help wondering if there was something wrong with his father's blood. Maybe it wasn't clotting right. Maybe he was a bleeder, a…whatever the name was for that condition they'd studied in human anatomy just a few months ago that he couldn't think of now if his life—or his father's life—depended on it.
What's happened to your memory, Perrin?
He imagined himself hearing it from a doctor: The results of some awful blood test were in, his father was at the start of a long
illness and probably wouldn't recover.
Forget it
, Charlie thought.
Get it out of your head
. He knew he was only thinking about something so grim because of his mother. That's what
her
tests had said: There was a problem with her blood, and it was something she wouldn't recover from. And they'd been right on the money with that one; she'd stayed sick until the day she died.
It wasn't a virus, stupid
.
It's not like Dad could have caught it from her
. But even thinking about it made Charlie realize that, deep down, he was panicked at the idea that he might lose his father, too.

“It's just a puncture wound, Charlie.” His father held up the newly bandaged thumb for inspection. “They're always slow to heal.”

Charlie closed up the first-aid kit and returned it to the kitchen. When he got back to the couch, his father had returned to watching the tennis match on TV. He looked calm, almost hypnotized. “Dad?”

“Hmm?” he said, without looking over.

“Can we…talk…about the other night?”

His father blinked at the television. “There's no need, Charlie.”

“I just thought it might be a good idea, you
know, if we talked about what's been going on lately.” He hesitated, realizing there was a slim chance his father knew about his pot smoking, and Charlie certainly didn't want to talk about
that
. “With you,” he clarified.

“There isn't any need, Charlie. Everything's going to be fine.” His father sounded confident, if drowsy. He glanced over at Charlie, finally, and added, “We're survivors, right?”

Charlie opened his mouth, but no words came out. This time, he was the one who looked away, shifting his gaze to the television. He swallowed and thought,
Are we?

 

He was clipping the gardenia bushes in the front of the house when he glanced over at the Volkswagen parked in the driveway. Right in the middle of the shining red hood was an enormous splatter of bird shit. “Damn it!” he said, throwing the hedge clippers down. As he crossed the yard, he peered up at the sky and saw the faint shapes of seagulls zigzagging against the blue. He'd just washed the Volkswagen that morning. It had looked perfect.

He uncoiled the hose from the side of the house and dragged the nozzle over to the car. The hit was fairly fresh; it all but vanished when the water blasted into it.

Someone had once told him that birds were color-blind, but Charlie didn't believe it. How could you even know such a thing? If he had to bet, he'd say seagulls could tell colors apart just fine. They obviously loved bright red.

He was going over the hood with a towel when a car rolled to a stop in front of the house. He looked up. It was Derrick Harding's silver Eclipse.

He felt his face draw tight across his skull.

The passenger door opened first. Wade Henson got out, his orange mullet haircut like a flame on top of a fat candle. He grinned at Charlie and made a pistol hand, casually pretending to shoot him. Then the driver's door opened.

Derrick Harding was a tall, thin guy. He wore an untucked mariachi and a pale-blue fishing cap with the bill turned up. He should have looked ridiculous in such an outfit. But somehow he looked tough. Dangerous. His face was narrow and sharp, his
expression always just slightly unamused. He'd graduated from Cernak and had turned into a business what he'd already been doing since the ninth grade. He considered himself a businessman. He called his buyers “clients.” He had a reputation for making things go his way.

After his mother died, Charlie had spent a couple of months in a kind of emotional hibernation, trying to interact with as few people as possible. When he came out of that, he felt like he no longer knew most of the friends he used to hang out with. He hadn't really missed seeing any of them—not like he still missed Sam—but he felt like a stranger. Then he hooked up with Derrick.

Mr. Fishing Hat. Mr. Laid-Back. For a few stupid weeks, Charlie had looked at Derrick as his new best friend. But it was mainly because Derrick had a great CD collection and was letting Charlie borrow whatever he wanted, and because Derrick was getting him high every time he went over to his apartment and sending him home with a Baggie. “I've got to start paying you for all this pot,” Charlie remembered saying to Derrick more than a few times, and
Derrick would always pat him on the back and say something like, “Don't sweat it, bro. You can pay me later. It's no big deal.” And, once, “If it'll make you feel better, I'll start keeping a tab with your name on it.”

“Do that,” Charlie had told him. “I'm good for it.”

Wade was always there: sitting in an armchair in a corner of Derrick's smoky living room, rocking his big head to the music, laughing at all of Derrick's jokes, never saying much to Charlie—until Derrick started sending him around to harass Charlie about his debt.

Derrick leaned against the side of the Eclipse while Wade planted his feet apart at the end of the driveway.

“Hi, Derrick,” Charlie said with less volume than he'd intended.

Derrick let his head tilt to one side. “Perrin. You disappoint me.”

“Sorry I haven't been around in a while. I've been pretty busy.”

Wade chuckled.

“Yeah,” Derrick said. “I miss your company. You know, Perrin, this is really awkward for me, having to come to your house like this. I mean, we're friends, right?”

Charlie felt himself nod.

“Business should just…
flow
between friends, so that it doesn't even feel like business. But there isn't much
flow
going on lately, is there?”

Charlie exhaled and sucked in a breath. “I know I owe you some money.”

“That you do. What it's up to now, Sutton?”

Wade held up five fingers.

“Five hundred bucks,” Derrick said. “And, you know, it's so embarrassing for me to have to come over here like this that I feel like I should add on gas money, just to save a little dignity. But I like you, Perrin. I always have. So let's just call it five even. No gas money. No embarrassment tax. Just five. I'm about to be the new DJ at the Mix Club, and I need some equipment. You're kind of holding me up.”

Charlie's mouth was dry. One day he was going to own a private island and be on ESPN discussing his record-breaking contract. Was this really happening
to him? “I'll get it to you, Derrick. I'm—I'm really sorry about not getting it to you before now.”

Derrick looked up at the sky. He looked down at his shoes. “You don't have it?”

“Not right now. Not all of it, anyway.”

“I don't understand. Heckle and Jeckle came by my place the other night to make a purchase, and they said
you'd
called them asking if they'd sell you some buzz. So I'm confused on two counts. One, that's a hell of a markup you're paying, if you're getting it from them after they get it from me. And two, what did you pay them with? Are you broke or not?”

“Pretty much….”

“Well, here I am, looking at a really nice vintage car you didn't have six months ago. I mean, it's nothing
I'd
ever want to be seen behind the wheel of, but it must have cost you a chunk of change. And six months ago, you already owed me—how much was it?”

Wade held up three fingers. He was such a loudmouth when he was alone; around Derrick, he became a silent clerk. A yes man.

“And now it's five, and you've bought this nice car. Unless your dad bought it for you.”

“Nobody bought it for me,” Charlie said.

Derrick clucked his tongue. “I just can't make sense of the math.”

“I'd been saving up for it. I'd been planning to buy it for a year.”

Derrick clucked his tongue again.

“Wait here,” Charlie said, feeling a very different sense of panic flooding his chest from the one he'd felt earlier, with his father. “I'll see what I can get.” He threw down the towel he'd been using to dry the hood and walked into the house.

There were two twenties and a ten in his wallet, on top of his dresser—the money he'd planned to use when he took Kate to the Vargo Steak House. He stuffed it into the pocket of his shorts and walked back to the front of the house, his mind racing for where he might find more.

His father was taking a nap on the couch in the living room. Charlie froze for a few moments, arguing with himself silently. Then, his heart pounding in his ears, he strode back down the hall to his father's bedroom. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. He took his father's wallet off the nightstand and
opened it. There was a ten-dollar bill folded into thirds. That was all.

How the hell was he going to scrape together five hundred dollars?
Sell something
, he thought, glancing around the house. But sell what?

Back outside, he kept Wade in his peripheral vision and approached Derrick, holding out the money palmed in one hand.

Derrick counted it. “Sixty. Wow, Perrin. Our friendship really means nothing to you, doesn't it?”

“I'll get the rest to you!” Charlie said. He cursed himself for bothering to glance at Wade as he said this, as if he owed Wade anything.

“Three days,” Derrick said, stuffing the money into his jeans pocket. “I think that's reasonable. After that, I can only assume you've decided to throw away our friendship.”

“I don't know if—”

“You don't know what?” Derrick asked. “If you can get the rest in three days? Come on. A superstar jock with a nice car like that? You're like money waiting to happen. Use your imagination. Otherwise, wow. I'm not good at this kind of thing,
Perrin, it's not my style. But it could get messy, you know?”

“I just don't—”

“Sure you do. You know.”

Charlie felt himself nodding. His feet were shifting around in ways his brain wasn't telling them to.

Wade climbed back into the Eclipse. Derrick turned toward the driver's door, then glanced up and said, “Oh, and I want my Stones CD back. You've had it for three months.”

 

He dialed Kate's number again that evening. Her mother answered—again.
Can't these people get an answering machine?
he thought. “Hi, Mrs. Bryant. It's Charlie.”

“I'm sorry, Charlie, but—” Same old line. He cut her off midsentence, thanked her, and hung up.

This is why no man is an island
, he thought sourly. He should tell Mr. Metcalf that. Nobody's an island because people are always getting in the way, telling you what you did wrong, telling you what a loser you are, pissing and moaning or getting all bent out of shape for no reason.

He rolled a joint, grabbed his basketball, and headed out the door. On his way past the VW, he stuck his rolling papers and half the pot he'd bought from the twins into the glove compartment. Kate wouldn't even
talk
to him, and he was supposed to pretend he wasn't getting high for her sake? He couldn't keep whatever he wanted in his own glove compartment, in his own car? Who did she think she was, Mother Teresa?

It was past nine. The neighborhood was dark and quiet, the only sound the occasional thump of his basketball against the sidewalk as he walked to the park. Once there, he stood off to the side, out of the streetlamp's light, and smoked the joint halfway down. He started to put it out, but he couldn't think of any reason not to smoke the rest of it, so he kept pulling at the wet paper until it was just a tiny roach he tossed onto the ground. The pot went straight to his head. He felt relaxed, a little dizzy. He'd never been in the park when he was high before. The court felt expansive, the rusted hoops a mile apart. He stood just dribbling the ball for a while, enjoying the sound it made when it hit the pavement. Then he started putting a little back-spin on it. Amazing. It felt alive when it hit his hands. He put more of a spin on it and caught it
again, then did it a third time and his hands missed the ball entirely, so that it rolled up his chest and popped him on the chin. His teeth knocked together. “Ow!” he said. “To hell with you!” Who was he talking to—the ball? It was a funny notion, standing on a court all by himself, talking to a basketball. Only he wasn't talking to the ball at all. He was talking to himself.

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